False as regards solar. Once a solar panel is manufactured it requires nothing to make it work ... and it will work for thirty years. Nearly true as regards nuclear, because mining the fuel is very energy intensive and it's mostly transport energy which is going to be harder to get from renewables.

Schaublin wrote:In the case of nuclear power, it is (was) about producing weapons grade material.

Partly right.

Schaublin wrote:All of the embedded energy costs in a solar panel come from oil and coal.

Historically, but not necessarily. There is no reason the energy used to make solar panels couldn't come from solar power.

If you mean they contribute nothing worthwhile to our energy supply, you are way out of date. Solar power is going ahead so fast it's hard to keep up with current figures, but think 10% - 20% total electricity production in countries that have encouraged it.

Schaublin wrote:The current "standard of living" in the West is as a result of easily extracted oil.

Good news. I'm confused though, it says by the end of last year. Is this what they have accomplished already or is it what they plan for the near future?chownahP.S. I've been reading some other good news. China supplies the bulk of the solar panels for the entire world and there has been a price drop in the price of solar panels so that profits have dropped and some companies are not profitable.... BUT....instead of cutting production they are building huge solar power generating installations with their surplus production and as far as I know maintaining the same production levels for panels.....if this trend continues it may well transform China from one of the dirtiest energy producers to one of the cleanest.chownah

Good news. I'm confused though, it says by the end of last year. Is this what they have accomplished already or is it what they plan for the near future?chownahP.S. I've been reading some other good news. China supplies the bulk of the solar panels for the entire world and there has been a price drop in the price of solar panels so that profits have dropped and some companies are not profitable.... BUT....instead of cutting production they are building huge solar power generating installations with their surplus production and as far as I know maintaining the same production levels for panels.....if this trend continues it may well transform China from one of the dirtiest energy producers to one of the cleanest.chownah

Compared to everyone else's use, China burns about half of the entire world's coal per year. They could definitely use more clean energy.

China is so big that anything it does will have a big effect on the whole world. In the last few years they have gotten serious about wind and solar but they started from a very low base. They already had a fair amount of hydro power and a bit of nuclear and are also increasing both of those. Unfortunately, they are still building coal-fired power plants, too - just slower than they otherwise would have been. Some almost-random recent stats:

The country is aiming for renewables to achieve parity with coal-fired power by 2020.

Including nuclear power, the nation installed 36 gigawatts of clean energy capacity in the 10 months through Oct. 31 [2013], the National Energy Administration said today in a statement on its website. Wind power increased by 7.9 gigawatts, while solar rose 3.6 gigawatts and nuclear expanded 2.2 gigawatts. Hydro electric power accounted for the remainder.

... but it's changing so fast that it's impossible to be sure of the current position.We do know, though, that they are world leaders in manufacturing wind turbines and solar panels, and the sheer scale of everything they do means that if (e.g.) Australia doubled its rate of wind power installation, China could supply the hardware without even noticing the difference. It's not all good, but certainly more good than bad.

False as regards solar. Once a solar panel is manufactured it requires nothing to make it work ... and it will work for thirty years. Nearly true as regards nuclear, because mining the fuel is very energy intensive and it's mostly transport energy which is going to be harder to get from renewables.

Schaublin wrote:In the case of nuclear power, it is (was) about producing weapons grade material.

Partly right.

Schaublin wrote:All of the embedded energy costs in a solar panel come from oil and coal.

Historically, but not necessarily. There is no reason the energy used to make solar panels couldn't come from solar power.

If you mean they contribute nothing worthwhile to our energy supply, you are way out of date. Solar power is going ahead so fast it's hard to keep up with current figures, but think 10% - 20% total electricity production in countries that have encouraged it.

Schaublin wrote:The current "standard of living" in the West is as a result of easily extracted oil.

True.

Schaublin wrote:There is no comparable alternative energy.

False.

Kim

Hello Kim.

The natural optimism of human beings combined with the almost universal religion of "progress" - whereby the future is always better, presents such a powerful mindset that no amount of straightforward - and, in many cases, simple maths and reasoning can change it. I do not intend to try to do it here as there are many, vastly more knowledgable, people that can be referenced but your point about the electricity from solar panels being used to produce more solar panels (it will never happen and is an impossibility) is a good starting point for people to understand the "snake oil" nature of claims that alternative energy is anything other than a distraction from ever more costly (difficult to extract) oil.

A big article and it starts with inspiring imagery but what do we see later on?

For the machine’s creators, this process—sparking and controlling a self-sustaining synthetic star—will be the culmination of decades of preparation, billions of dollars’ worth of investment, and immeasurable ingenuity, misdirection, recalibration, infighting, heartache, and ridicule. ... No one knows iter’s true cost, which may be incalculable, but estimates have been rising steadily, and a conservative figure rests at twenty billion dollars …iter’s design is based on an idea that Andrei Sakharov and another Russian physicist, Igor Tamm, sketched out in the nineteen-fifties. It is called a tokamak … So far, the vast machine exists only as 1.8 terabytes of digital information, accessible on a secure computing cloud …

Fusion power has been ten or twenty years in the future since the 1950s and, for all I can see here, it still is. It would be nice to be able to be more positive but I can't see fusion power making a significant contribution to the energy problems we have now, i.e. peak oil accompanied by climate change due to CO2 from fossil fuels. We desperately need to cut CO2 emissions, substantially, in the next ten years, and fusion will be too late to help. Simultaneously, peak oil will drive up oil costs over the next ten years and all sorts of other technologies will become well and truly competitive with oil. In fact, some of them already are.

They are building a fusion reactor right now in France I think, and its just a test reactor, not intended to generate enough power to run much of anything, and its costing billions of billions of dollars!!!

18 years ago I made one of the most important decisions of my life and entered a local Cambodian Buddhist Temple as a temple boy and, for only 3 weeks, an actual Therevada Buddhist monk. I am not a scholar, great meditator, or authority on Buddhism, but Buddhism is something I love from the Bottom of my heart. It has taught me sobriety, morality, peace, and very importantly that my suffering is optional, and doesn't have to run my life. I hope to give back what little I can to the Buddhist community that has so generously given me so much, sincerely former monk John

lyndon taylor wrote:They are building a fusion reactor right now in France I think, and its just a test reactor, not intended to generate enough power to run much of anything, and its costing billions of billions of dollars!!!

That's the one in the article Rowboat linked to and I commented on. Read all about it!

Sorry my bad!! I did already read all about it from a different news source some months ago, though.

18 years ago I made one of the most important decisions of my life and entered a local Cambodian Buddhist Temple as a temple boy and, for only 3 weeks, an actual Therevada Buddhist monk. I am not a scholar, great meditator, or authority on Buddhism, but Buddhism is something I love from the Bottom of my heart. It has taught me sobriety, morality, peace, and very importantly that my suffering is optional, and doesn't have to run my life. I hope to give back what little I can to the Buddhist community that has so generously given me so much, sincerely former monk John

Well anti viruses have to be tested in test tubes before they are injected into millions of people so its probably better that they start smaller, I mean if something did go horribly wrong we'd only lose a couple cities in France instead of the whole country!!!

18 years ago I made one of the most important decisions of my life and entered a local Cambodian Buddhist Temple as a temple boy and, for only 3 weeks, an actual Therevada Buddhist monk. I am not a scholar, great meditator, or authority on Buddhism, but Buddhism is something I love from the Bottom of my heart. It has taught me sobriety, morality, peace, and very importantly that my suffering is optional, and doesn't have to run my life. I hope to give back what little I can to the Buddhist community that has so generously given me so much, sincerely former monk John

Kim OHara: A big article and it starts with inspiring imagery but what do we see later on?

You and Lyndon both seem to be operating under the belief that I posted the article with stars in my eyes. This is not the case. And the article itself is balanced in my opinion. It is not out of place on this thread; Discussion of Nuclear Power and Safety.

My personal opinion is that there will not be any last-minute Grand Repair Schemes from the scientific community.

Rain soddens what is covered up,It does not sodden what is open.Therefore uncover what is coveredThat the rain will not sodden it. Ud 5.5

Actually, no, rowboat, I think we can almost agree that nuclear fission power without any residual radioactivity would be a big win win for everybody, Nuclear fusion possibly(I'm not knowledgeable enough to know for sure) presents just that, a way to harness huge amounts of energy without significant long term radiation, it also presents the possibility of a huge bomb like explosion, that could be even more devastating that a nuclear reactor exploding. Theres a book, I think, called "We almost lost Chicago" about early experiments with nuclear fusion that almost went horribly wrong, sometime I think in the 50s. Certainly the first step to a fusion reactor is a test reactor, much smaller in output than a commercial one, but the cost is astronomical, on the other hand the amount of power a functioning Commercial reactor produced would be huge, at least that's what they're hoping, and they won't know if that is even feasible till they get this test reactor functioning.

When people finally calculate just how expensive fusion power will be to generate, solar, wind and wave power might become incredible bargains by comparison, which would be good in any case.

18 years ago I made one of the most important decisions of my life and entered a local Cambodian Buddhist Temple as a temple boy and, for only 3 weeks, an actual Therevada Buddhist monk. I am not a scholar, great meditator, or authority on Buddhism, but Buddhism is something I love from the Bottom of my heart. It has taught me sobriety, morality, peace, and very importantly that my suffering is optional, and doesn't have to run my life. I hope to give back what little I can to the Buddhist community that has so generously given me so much, sincerely former monk John

lyndon taylor wrote:Actually, no, rowboat, I think we can almost agree that nuclear fission power without any residual radioactivity would be a big win win for everybody, Nuclear fusion possibly(I'm not knowledgeable enough to know for sure) presents just that, a way to harness huge amounts of energy without significant long term radiation, it also presents the possibility of a huge bomb like explosion, that could be even more devastating that a nuclear reactor exploding. Theres a book, I think, called "We almost lost Chicago" about early experiments with nuclear fusion that almost went horribly wrong, sometime I think in the 50s. Certainly the first step to a fusion reactor is a test reactor, much smaller in output than a commercial one, but the cost is astronomical, on the other hand the amount of power a functioning Commercial reactor produced would be huge, at least that's what they're hoping, and they won't know if that is even feasible till they get this test reactor functioning.

When people finally calculate just how expensive fusion power will be to generate, solar, wind and wave power might become incredible bargains by comparison, which would be good in any case.

I don't think you are aware of how patronizing you can be. It's absurd.

Rain soddens what is covered up,It does not sodden what is open.Therefore uncover what is coveredThat the rain will not sodden it. Ud 5.5

Sorry, I wasn't posting for your benefit or any vain attempt to patronize you, you said I had the impression that you had stars in your eyes, I had no such idea, I did not read the article you linked to because I didn't like the sound of the introduction to it posted. As I said I had already read about it, probably on the BBC. If you don't agree that fusion could possibly be a clean energy fine, otherwise, what are you on my case for, I'm just trying to participate in a discussion I'm no expert on, but have read quite a bit about. sorry.......

Well I started reading the article you linked to rowboat, but the flowery prose detracted from the actual story, and he seemed to take three pages to say what could be summed up in a few sentences, I can definitely say the complete article is above my attention span, and I was glad to read the one page equivalent from the source I had already read.

Here's the latest article from the BBC, with pictures of how its built, no talk of the astronomical costs, and a rough estimate of 60 years before anything functional could be in operation, so I guess you naysayers have a point!!! And about 10 times shorter article in length.

18 years ago I made one of the most important decisions of my life and entered a local Cambodian Buddhist Temple as a temple boy and, for only 3 weeks, an actual Therevada Buddhist monk. I am not a scholar, great meditator, or authority on Buddhism, but Buddhism is something I love from the Bottom of my heart. It has taught me sobriety, morality, peace, and very importantly that my suffering is optional, and doesn't have to run my life. I hope to give back what little I can to the Buddhist community that has so generously given me so much, sincerely former monk John